Merchant ship crews are designed to deliver cargo. Many have turned into search and rescue missions, saving desperate migrants crossing the Mediterranean to get to Europe.
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As the weather warms, and more people attempt the crossing, merchant crews are again being called on to rescue scores of people in danger of drowning. The European Border and Coast Guard Agency based in Warsaw said this week that 12 percent of the 470 rescue incidents it tracked so far this year have involved cargo ships.
That’s up from just 4 percent in 2016.
“We’re not talking about rescuing a couple of people, we’re talking about rescuing hundreds of people at a time,” said Simon Bennett, external relations director at the International Chamber of Shipping. “The crews are being traumatized after all these rescues. It’s not what they’re trained to do.”
The peak year for sea crossings was 2015, when more than a 3,700 people died trying to get from Turkey to Greece and from North Africa, mainly Libya, to Italy. That year, about a quarter of the maritime rescues were performed by cargo vessels that saved about 60,000 people, according to the European Community Shipowners’ Association.
With the overland route across the Balkans essentially closed, the worry is that the number of people trying to cross from North Africa, where Libya has turned into a failed state unable to control its frontiers, will soar. Because of the distance across the open sea to Italy, the central Mediterranean route is significantly deadlier than the much shorter one from Turkey to Greece across the Aegean — a route essentially closed after the Turkey-EU migration deal last year.
A risky route
More than 59,000 migrants crossed via the Mediterranean this year as of May 24, the vast majority of them arriving in Italy, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. An estimated 1,520 died or went missing in the effort.
The situation is creating consternation for merchant shipping organizations, as cargo ships are left to bear the material and psychological brunt of rescuing people at sea. They want the EU and other international organizations to step in and provide professional search and rescue operations and to work to stabilize Libya.
“These ships have a legal and moral obligation to help and rescue, but there’s no strategy to reduce the number of deaths,” said Peter Hinchliffe, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Shipping.
The chamber is also worried that another wave of migrants could prompt EU countries to change policy and become more reluctant to allow asylum seekers to disembark from the merchant ships that have rescued them.
The trade association asked the United Nations for help in January, and turned to the U.N. Refugee Agency, the International Organization for Migration and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in the last few weeks. The maritime agency is the only one that’s responded so far, Hinchliffe said.
Under the International Maritime Organization’s 1914 Safety of Life at Sea convention, adopted two years after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic, merchant crews are legally obliged to rescue people in distress. That duty has been reinforced by decades of international law and treaties.
“I’ve heard horror stories of what some of these people have to go through. It can be very traumatic to the crew,” said Lieselot Marinus, director of shipping and trade policy with the European Commercial Shipowners’ Association.
Seafarers aren’t trained, and ships are not equipped with supplies to deal with illnesses, babies, small children or other issues, said Captain Rajesh Dhadwal, vice president of marine and risk at the Bahamas-based Campbell Shipping Company.
Maritime rescue
The 22-member crew of Campbell Shipping Company’s CS Caprice met the issue head-on in October 2014, when Captain Joshua Bhatt received a distress call from the rescue coordination center in Malta. The Caprice was sailing from Latvia to Qatar, and Bhatt re-routed the ship to intercept a boat filled with hundreds of migrants north of Libya.
“There were a lot of concerns the crew and the company had before doing a rescue of this size,” Dhadwal said.
The 510 migrants refused to come aboard the Caprice unless Bhatt promised to take them to Italy.
“Seeing how small the kids were on board really motivated the crew to give everything they had for the next 72 hours,” Dhadwal said. “There were people holding up babies and small children to show the crew who needed saving.”
Rescue calls are forcing ships to shift course and delay arrivals to take migrants to safety, usually in Italy. Shipping companies say insurance covers most, but not all, the financial costs.
Emergency rescues can also swell the number of people aboard a ship, as the average cargo vessel carries roughly 20 crew.
“A couple of years ago our ships did a few rescues amounting to 100 to 200 people per rescue of all ages and nationalities,” said Dirk Fry, director of Columbia Ship Management in Cyprus. “We luckily haven’t had a rescue in two years, but our crews always have to be on the lookout when going through the Mediterranean.”
When commercial ships began to undertake rescues, the industry issued guidance intended to help crews cope and inform them of proper procedures. The IMO said if a migrant claims to be a refugee or an asylum seeker, the ship’s master must follow international refugee law. When saving refugees, IMO recommends a list of actions for captains to follow, including determining if special arrangements are needed and informing the ship’s owner.
The EU and its member countries stepped up to try to relieve the burden after the International Chamber of Shipping put out a call to action in 2015, but it hasn’t been enough.
“The conventions drawn up so many years ago weren’t designed for the situation today,” the International Chamber of Shipping’s Bennett said.
But for now, the 1914 convention continues to hold lightly trained merchant crews accountable for rescuing migrants.
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